Legibility is not insurance

A scene from a story. Illustration, not evidence. Nothing in it is a finding. What it stands in for, and what it does not establish, is set out below.

And the ajo lost ₦400,000, which the ajo does not have a mechanism for losing, because an ajo is not insured, it is witnessed — the collateral is that everyone in it knows everyone in it, and Emeka's default was, in the only sense that matters, legible. Everyone knew exactly what had happened to him. Nobody thought he was a thief.

It broke anyway.

Not because they blamed him. Because a rotating circle is a settlement structure with no slack in it, and eleven years of trust does not conjure ₦400,000 in a month, and two of the women in it had children in school in September, and by the second month there were four people out and the rotation could not close, and something that had run since 2014 simply stopped existing.